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Saturday, March 19, 2016

EVA’S OFFENSIVE: The Battle for the Hearts, Minds and Classroom Seats of NYC Charter Schools

March 18, 2016::After many months of intense scrutiny and criticism, Dr. Eva Moskowitz,
the founder and CEO of Success Academies Charter School Network, has gone on
the offensive. In this effort, she has the help of an expensive PR firm,
her traditional ally the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Club of New York,
and–surprisingly–WNYC reporter Beth Fertig.

The recent criticism began last October, when the PBS
NewsHour exposed
her practice of multiple out of school suspensions of 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds.
(My last piece for the NewsHour before I retired.) Later in
October Kate Taylor of the New York Times revealed that one of her schools
had a ‘got
to go’ list of students to be dropped. Moskowitz
did not fire the principal. In an electrifying report in February,
Taylor wrote
about a video of a Success Academy teacher humiliating a child.

Dr. Moskowitz has retained Mercury LLC, the same PR firm
that is advising Michigan’s embattled Governor, Rick Snyder. She emailed
her staff accusing the New York Times of a ‘vendetta’ against her. On
Monday, March 14, the Wall Street Journal published her op-ed, “Orderliness
in School: What a Concept”. “Over the past year the Times’s principal
education reporter has devoted 34% of the total word count for her education
stories, including four of her seven longest articles, to unrelentingly negative
coverage of Success,” Moskowitz wrote.

But her main point was that she and Success Academies
represent the last line of defense against violent and disruptive behavior in
our schools. Did the PR firm suggest she tar her critics with the old
reliable “commie-pinko” brush? (Making it parenthetical was a nice
touch.)

“The unstated premise is that parents are susceptible to
being duped because they are poor and unsophisticated. (Once upon a time, this
view was known as “false consciousness”—the Marxist critique of how the
proletariat could be misled by capitalist society.)”

The Harvard Club of New York is, perhaps inadvertently, also
helping Moskowitz. It has scheduled an evening presentation on Monday,
March 29th , to be followed by a panel discussion. The blurb describing
the event makes no mention of any criticism. Here’s a sample:

Eva Moskowitz founded Success Academy Charter Schools in
2006 with the dual mission of building world-class schools for New York City
children and serving as a catalyst and a national model for education reform to
help change public policies that prevent so many children from having access to
opportunity. Firmly believing that inner-city students deserve the same
high-quality education as their more affluent peers, and convinced that all
children, regardless of zip code or socioeconomic background, can achieve at
the highest levels, she opened the first Success Academy in Harlem and
today operates 34 schools in some of the city’s most disadvantaged
neighborhoods. Success Academy continues to grow at a rapid pace and will be
hiring more than 900 teachers and other personnel before the next academic
year.

After Moskowitz’s presentation, a discussion will be
moderated by a ‘Senior Reporter’ from The 74, which is not a journalistic
organization but an advocacy group. The panelists are James
Merriman, President, New York City Charter School Center; Michael
Petrilli, President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute; and Charles Sahm,
Director, Education Policy, Manhattan Institute, all strong charter school
advocates who have publicly supported Moskowitz and Success Academies.

What do you suppose they will ‘debate’? How about this
for a tough question: The New York Times: Threat or Menace?

The event is open to Club members and their guests. (I
cannot attend because I will be out of the country.)

Moskowitz’s most surprising ally in her PR offensive is Beth
Fertig of WNYC public radio here in New York. She and her colleague Jenny Ye
reported on March 15 that NYC
Charters Retain Students Better Than Traditional Schools.’ The lead
sentence: “Citywide, across all grades, 10.6 percent of charter school students
transferred out in 2013-14, compared to 13 percent of traditional public school
students.” They cite the KIPP charter network as having an especially low
attrition rate, about 25% of the rate in neighboring traditional schools.

This is like comparing the kids who go to the playground to
toss a ball around with the kids whose parents enroll them in the karate
program at the Y, buy them uniforms and accompany them to practice and
competitions.

Of course the departure rate from traditional
urban public schools is higher. Families lose their homes and have to move.
Parents change jobs and have to move. The single parent gets sick and has
to move in with relatives. And generally the kids then move to the
closest school. I.E., they ‘transfer.’

On the other hand, getting into a charter school
entails jumping through hoops, often a lot of them, and those parents–who have
sought out what they hope to be better opportunities for their children–are not
going to change schools just because of a job loss or an illness. Some
charter school students may ‘transfer’ because their school doesn’t provide the
special education services they’re supposed to. Some students may
‘transfer’ after being sent home multiple times for minor offenses. That
seems to happen quite often at Success Academies, which has a
long laundry list of offenses that warrant out of school suspensions.

Therefore, comparing transfer rates is meaningless, a waste
of the reporter’s time and public radio’s resources. Every well run
charter school should have attrition rates as low as KIPP’s, or lower.

This silly and meaningless exercise in comparing unconnected
numbers makes Success Academies look good. Although SA had the second-worst
attrition rate (57.4% of traditional schools), that’s not how WNYC presented
it. Here’s what they wrote:

We found most of Success’s 18 schools in the 2013-14
school year had attrition rates that were lower than those of their local
districts. The two schools that were slightly higher are in Bedford Stuyvesant
and Cobble Hill (where the first grade teacher was caught on camera).Bed Stuy 2’s attrition rate was 13.4 percent versus 12.4
percent for traditional public schools in District 14. The Cobble Hill school’s attrition rate was 12.5 percent versus
10.8 percent in the regular District 15 schools.

“Our low attrition rates reflect what parents appreciate
about our schools,” said Success founder Moskowitz. “That our classrooms are as
joyful as they are rigorous.”

Allowing Success Academies to boast of a supposedly low
attrition rate is beyond ironic, because the organization plays fast and loose
with numbers. The single most accurate way to calculate attrition is to
list everyone who starts school on Day One and then count again 365 days later
on the following Day One to determine who has left. Then the school could
figure out why students left and, where appropriate, make adjustments.
This is what KIPP does. The resulting number is not necessarily
flattering because it includes everyone who left: some families move out
of town, some kids decide they don’t want to work that hard, other kids just
want to be with their peers, and so on.

A second way to count attrition would be from September 1 to
June 25th or whenever school lets out. That leaves out summer loss, which
actually is pretty significant. Other charter networks I am aware of
count attrition this way.

The third way produces the lowest and most impressive
attrition number: That entails counting attrition from the official NYC attendance
count day, known as BEDS. That occurs fairly early in October. So a
school can count the number of students on October 10th and count again on June
25th. Doing it this way means that whatever happens between the true
opening of school (late August or early September) and BEDS does not show up on
any records. So if a charter network employs multiple out-of-school
suspensions during that 6-week period, August-25-October 10, no one outside of
the network would EVER know.

Approach #3 is the one taken by Success Academies, which is
why Moskowitz boasts of low attrition.

The Eva Moskowitz mess is emblematic of a larger problem in
charter world. Greg Richmond is the President and CEO of the National
Association of Charter School Authorizers. I suggest everyone read his recent
speech about the state of the charter movement. Three paragraphs seem
particularly relevant to this discussion of Success Academies.

We have created schools that will not enroll students in
upper grade levels. We have some schools that believe it is appropriate to
counsel children out mid-year. Some charters believe it is appropriate to tell
families of students with disabilities that their charter school cannot serve
them.

In short, charters have relied on the district schools to
be a safety net for students not served by charter schools. That’s not right.
If we believe that charter schools can provide a better education for children,
we need to include all children.

Charter schools have also chosen to fight against school
districts even when it was in the public interest to work together.

Eva Moskowitz is fighting hard to maintain her
position as the face and voice of the charter school movement here in New York
City–and perhaps beyond. In my private conversations with leaders of
other charter networks here, they have told me that they wish this weren’t so,
but so far they have not been willing to stand up and be counted.